We're in a terrible fix, and Tony Judt, with his characteristic clear-headed and highly knowledgable approach, goes into considerable detail about how we got here. His arguments are very compelling to me, because I sensed (but unsystematically and inchoately) the same things. With his background, knowledge, and skill in laying out his arguments, however, it should be clear to all but the most doctrinaire why we're in deep trouble. Judt does suggest some ways to start getting out of our current state, but those solutions are necessarily long-term, most likely beyond any hope of happening while I'm still around to witness them.Anyone who cares about our society and is interested in doing something about it ought to read this book. Tony Judt's final book, written under the burden of Lou Gehrig's disease and paralyzed from the neck down, is the swansong of one of the greatest public intellectuals of our age. It is essential reading. Judt casts a critical eye upon the current political, economic and moral situation in the West, lamenting what we have lost and trying to nudge us back onto the righteous path. He is a Social Democrat and moderate leftist, critical of both right and left wing ideologies, and he would argue that the Western world from the end of World War II to about 1980 was the high point of human civilisation, a belief that I think many would agree with. This was an era that delivered huge economic growth, declines in poverty and hunger, massive improvements in healthcare and education, increased equality and great advances in personal freedom and opportunity. Ever since then, with the victories of Thatcher and Reagan, the deregulation of the financial sector and the ascendancy of the ideas of economists such as Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek, we have been abandoning the advances our civilisation has made and returning to a Victorian state of affairs. Poverty and inequality have increased, social mobility has declined, almost all of the economic growth has disappeared into to the offshore bank accounts of a rapacious plutocracy and our political systems have become increasingly worthless. Our current overarching concern is what does it cost and how can it be made more 'efficient' and cost effective? We have subordinated every other concern or value to this question, which is a frankly disgusting basis for a civilization. Judt argues that our discourse has become corrupted and that it is necessary to change the way we discuss political and economic matters. People are under the impression that the state is necessarily and universally less efficient and successful than the private sector and that the state should be stripped back to the bare minimum to allow the private sector to flourish. This is demonstrably, provably untrue. Only someone who has been brainwashed by right wing ideologues could possibly believe this, and then only by not making any effort to look at the evidence themselves. Judt believes in Social Democracy because it is a practical, pragmatic compromise between the blinkered, lumbering fantasia of total state control and the untrammelled savagery of a libertarian, free market society. He gives an example of one area in which it is perfectly obvious that only a state monopoly can deliver the goods, which I see one or two reviewers have criticised as boring, eccentric and unnecessary. He discusses trains, in the west in general but focussing upon Britain in particular. Trains are an unqualified public good. They connect different people and places, open a country up, transport huge numbers of people quickly and efficiently in an environmentally friendly manner, reducing our reliance on cars and planes. The French and Italian governments had invested two to three times as much money per head into their railways as the British because they saw it as a public good. The British chronically underfunded British Rail, it came to be seen as dreadful, allowing the government to make the claim that the private sector could do a better job. The the government sold the railways off cheap, guaranteeing the private rail companies against losses with huge public subsidies. Today there is only one train line that is in the hands of the state, East Coast, and it is the most efficient service we have, costing less money to the tax payer than we are paying in subsidies to the private operators of the other train lines. Of course the government is making plans to sell it off as soon as possible. There is no way of introducing any of the virtues of free market competition to the railways because every route is operated by one monopolist. They can't compete on price, or service or quality. There is no consumer choice. I think Judt does a superb job of identifying the problems in our current society and showing how it was not always thus. He tells us how and why we were able to work together to achieve great things in the past and is optimistic that we will be able to do so again soon. However, I'm sad to say I don't know where his confidence in the future comes from. He says that the only way to make things better in the democratic west is by voting and being engaged in politics, but he doesn't discuss the fact that British and American politics is held in a stranglehold by a bunch of elitist politicians in different coloured ties who are in thrall to business and finance. The barriers to a new political party entering either of these political systems with a new message and new policies and getting anywhere seems overwhelming to me. He also writes inspiringly about how a generation came together with a common purpose to build a better future founded upon higher values than mercenary self interest and says there is no reason this cannot happen again. However, this generation was forged by two world wars and the great depression. They had great experience in working together towards higher goals, putting your country, or your values or your comrades before yourself, and they had experienced enough poverty, degradation and horror to know that it was well worth fighting to make the world a better place. I don't know where he thinks this solidarity and common purpose is going to come from today. Today we are facing the gravest threat to the human race there has ever been in climate change, but we seem to be completely unable to pull together and do anything about it because, as Judt has observed we have become dominated by selfishness, individualism and an accountant mentality. We apparently lack the ability to come together towards a higher purpose to combat a threat which is bigger than the black death, or World War II, or the possibility of nuclear holocaust. If Martians were to invade tomorrow I think that the world would band together to fight against a common enemy. Unfortunately climate change isn't a vivid or direct enough enemy for people to conceive of to allow us to work together to fight it. I do not share Judt's optimism.
What do You think about Algo Va Mal (2000)?
Em português "Um Tratado Sobre Os Nossos Actuais Descontentamentos"
—jade_anderson_34
Bit dystopian but very entertaining read.
—Pahulu
An unusual book - a reasonable polemic!
—darrenchangla
